An Organ-Trafficking Conviction in Kosovo

In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, I investigate allegations that, around the time of the 1999 Kosovo war, the Kosovo Liberation Army trafficked prisoners across the border into Albania, killed them, and harvested their organs. Hashim Thaci, the current Prime Minister of Kosovo, is among those accused of being responsible; a 2010 report, published by the Council of Europe, accused him of being the “boss” of a “network of unlawful activity,” which included prisoner abuse and organ harvesting. Thaci strongly denies the allegations and, despite all of these nasty insinuations, not a single case of suspected organ trafficking has gone before a judge and yielded a verdict.

That changed Monday, when an international panel of judges from the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo issued multiple convictions of human trafficking and organized crime. The charges don’t relate directly to the war years, or include Thaci or his close associates; they are centered on Medicus, a transplant clinic in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. The prosecution argued that, in 2008, a urologist named Lutfi Dervishi began performing kidney transplants there for money. (The sale of organs is outlawed everywhere in the world except Iran.) In its 2010 report, the Council of Europe cited Dervishi’s clinic as evidence of an organ trade that began during the war and continued afterward, “albeit in other forms.”

Over a span of eight months, Dervishi and his associates are said to have performed two dozen operations. A Turkish surgeon, Yusuf Sonmez, who is known in the Turkish press as Dr. Frankenstein, for his role in the black-market organ trade, was “the lead surgeon in most, if not all, of the illegal kidney transplants,” according to a statement read by the judges. (Sonmez remains a fugitive.) The judges found Dervishi guilty and sentenced him to eight years in jail; his son got seven years, their anesthesiologist three. Dervishi and his son were also ordered to pay fifteen thousand euros to each victim.

As he was leaving the courtroom today, Jonathan Ratel, the Canadian prosecutor who headed the case, called me. He was out of breath, sounding both ecstatic and relieved. “This proves beyond any doubt whatsoever that trafficking in persons has taken place in Kosovo,” he said. “There is absolutely no doubt about that now…. Trafficking persons and the removal of their organs took place in [this] country for a lengthy period of time.” An hour after we spoke, he announced, through a press release, that he had widened his inquiry to include eight more individuals for possible charges of “organized crime, trafficking in persons, abuse of authority, and related offenses for activities in the Medicus clinic and outside Kosovo.” The question remains whether investigators will be able to trace the illicit organ-harvesting activities back to Thaci’s K.L.A.

Photograph by Visar Kryeziu/AP.

Nicholas Schmidle, a staﬀ writer, is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.